Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Difficulties

A great classical scholar, Eduard Norden, has remarked, 'Paul is a great writer whom I, at least, understand only with very great difficulty.'

D.S. Colman, Greece & Rome 7 (1960) 72:

Sometimes I am reduced to shame and despair by my own endless ignorance of the classical languages, but then I am comforted by reading a passage in the Life of Bishop Christopher Wordsworth which tells how the Bishop, when a young man at Cambridge, was told by a friend that 'the late Professor Dobree had nearly given up reading Sophocles, as there were scarcely ten lines together where he did not meet with some impediment.'